


Leading By Example

by NervousAsexual



Series: Sometimes a Family [2]
Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Aromantic Characters, Asexual Characters, Fluff, Leading by Example (quest), Nick needs more love and by god I will give it to him, qpr, with some degree of angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-21
Updated: 2018-02-21
Packaged: 2019-03-21 11:25:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13739874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NervousAsexual/pseuds/NervousAsexual
Summary: Sure she's technically a parent... but that doesn't mean Euthalia's going to be good with Brotherhood squires.





	1. Chapter 1

To Euthalia's surprise, Lancer Captain Kells did not comment on Nick's presence.

He'd offered not to go at all, suggested maybe she ought to take Danse or Piper or somebody the Brotherhood would like, but she was not going to let the Brotherhood dictate who she could or couldn't be friends with.

But, after all, Kells didn't say a word about the obvious synth following her around the Prydwen.

"Skills like yours should be shared," he told her, though he didn't specify which skills he had in mind. "If you're willing, I'd like to enlist your help in educating our squires."

"Squires?" Euthalia glanced back at Nick, but he just gave her a vaguely amused grin and offered nothing else. "Sure, I guess. I'd love to help."

"Excellent. One of the squires will meet you on the ground. I've given her a location. Escort her there and show her how the Brotherhood deals with all the usual post-war aberrations. Mutants, ghouls, synths..."

Again she looked back at Nick, but he was fiddling with the tension levels on his hand and didn't say anything.

"The squire will observe and assist under your guidance. She'll be learning by example."

"Sounds like fun." Seemed simple enough. Like parenting, but when you got tired you could hand the kid back over to the Brotherhood and get on with your life. That, and there was also the possibility of the kid getting eaten by super mutant.

Maybe not so simple after all.

"Splendid." The Lancer Captain turned back to his controls. "The squire will meet you at the gates to the airfield. Bring her back in one piece, Knight."

"Practicing for the real thing?" Nick asked as they made their way to the vertibird.

"Why not? Shaun's not going to be a baby anymore. Besides, how else am I gonna spread my chaotic good propaganda throughout the Brotherhood if I don't get them while they're young."

Nick blinked at her. "I have no idea what that means."

"Eh, don't worry about it."

She took control of the minigun on the way down. Not that she really expected super mutant behemouths or raiders with rocket launchers to show up, but there only was the one seat and the idea of Nick manning the minigun was both cute and funny but not especially practical. He held onto the edge of the seat with both hands, like he was afraid they'd do a sudden barrel-roll just to get rid of him. It was just a short ride down to the tarmac. There wasn't that much time to get up to shenanigans.

When they were again on solid ground she gave him a little pat on the shoulder. "Was that so bad?"

"Hey, if you trust these crazy contraptions, more power to ya. Just don't tell me we're meant to fly around in glorified washtubs and expect me to like it."

"Have I ever steered you wrong?" Well, actually, she had once or twice, had led them into a deathclaw nest once and gotten them cornered in molerat burrow another time, but he hadn't said anything yet and she flagged down a knight in full power armor before he could. "Excuse me. I'm looking for a squire? Supposed to be taking her out on a job."

"Sure thing." The knight nodded her head back toward the workshop. "Peewee's just the other side of that wall there. Red cap, backpack, knee-high to a mutie, can't miss her."

"Thanks." She turned back to Nick. "You don't mind coming along, do you? I don't want to pressure you into feeling like you have to go out with me and the kid."

He smiled at her. "I'll give you the same answer anytime you want to travel together. I wouldn't miss it for the world."

That warmed her insides like her own internal radiation source. Wasn't sure what to say to it, but it sure felt nice. "That must be the squire. Let me get her... squired away."

Nick laughed and shook his head, and that felt pretty nice too.

 The squire was standing in a corner, keeping an eye on everything and rocking back and forth on her feet. She saw Euthalia coming and her face lit right up. She snapped to attention and saluted. "Reporting for duty, ma'am!"

"Hi." Euthalia gave her what she hoped was a winning smile. "You know where this mission is, right?"

"Yes, ma'am! Wicked Fleet Shipping Lockup!"

"Oh, wow." She glanced back as Nick came up beside her. That sounded awfully far away. Was the kid supposed to walk there? Was she supposed to carry her? Were there little miniature suits of power armor so the kid could keep up? How long was this mission supposed to take, anyway?

"Um, ma'am?"

"Yes, uh, squire. What's up?"

The squire had sidled up beside her and was looking straight ahead. "There's a synth, ma'am."

"Oh! Yes. Sorry. This is Nick. He travels with me. And now you're traveling with me. So in a way, I guess, you're both traveling together now."

Nick gave the squire a little wave. The squire looked nervous, didn't wave back, but she didn't... try to stab him or anything, so that was probably a good sign.

"She says we're on our way to Wicked Shipping."

Nick considered this. "Yeah? That's clear across the Commonwealth."

Exactly. She gave the kid a smile, hoping it would be reassuring.

"At least we'll be able to make a stop-off in Sanctuary."

That was... a fair point. She leaned down to the squire's level. "You'll like that. I've got a whole collection of comics you can read, if you want, and you can see where I used to live. Oh, and you can meet Codsworth. He's a genuine pre-war Mister Handy."

"I've already met Mister Handies. Proctor Ingram has loads of them. They help her out with maintaining the power armor."

"Well, Codsworth helps me out with the gardening."

"He does good work," Nick agreed. "We'd better get to moving. It's a long walk to Wicked Shipping."

"I won't get tired," the squire said. "I've been training for forever for this!"

"You'll do just fine," Euthalia told her with a laugh. She herded the squire and Nick out through the gate and was about to follow when the knight put a hand on her shoulder.

"Why would you bring that synth here?" she asked. "Aren't you afraid it might be an Institute spy?"

Euthalia didn't know what to say to that. She jerked out of the knight's grasp and forged on after her friend and her squire.


	2. Chapter 2

"I'm not afraid of death," the squire said, gazing with unblinking eyes into the campfire. "The Brotherhood of Steel has my back."

What do you say to that? Euthalia wondered. She glanced over at Nick and he glanced back. She wasn't sure what his facial expression was supposed to mean. But he smiled at her anyway.

"We may have broken the squire," she told him.

"I'm not tired," said the squire.

"How far is it to Wicked Shipping?"

Nick tossed a handful of leaves on the fire. "I thought we were stopping off at Sanctuary."

"We can hit it on the way back. It's just been a long walk and I feel like we should probably be getting the squire back."

"Well, how far depends on whether you want to take the roads or go for a hike."

"Just tell me how I can get to the designated killing grounds in the least amount of time."

"Hmm." He rubbed the skeletal hand on his chin. "If we cut through Walden's Pond, depending on squire here's top speed we should be there in ninety minutes, two hours."

The squire still wasn't blinking. Her chin was propped up on her knees, though, and she looked like she was going into some kind of trance.

"What's the top speed of a sleep-deprived twelve-year-old?"

"I don't need to sleep," the squire piped up. "When I'm a knight I won't have time to sleep."

"Oh no, of course not," Nick said. "But you'll have power armor then and you'll be traveling faster."

The squire frowned. "I asked them if I could have a gun but Proctor Teagan just laughed at me."

 Euthalia waved a hand. "We're getting sidetracked. The sooner we can get to Sanctuary the sooner we can all get some rest. Maybe you don't need to sleep..." She winked at the squire. "...but I do."

Still the squire didn't look convinced. Nick gave a dramatic sigh and got to his feet.

"Come on," he said, stomping out the fire. "I can give you a lift."

"A what?" the squire asked, but when he crouched down she climbed up on his back like she'd been doing it her whole life. She wrapped her legs around his middle and hooked her chin over his shoulder, and it was so damn cute Euthalia could have died.

 "Take a picture, it'll last longer." Nick shifted the squire around but she was latched on pretty tight.

"I'm sorry." The joke was on him, she really wasn't. "This is just awfully sweet of you."

"Hey, I can be sweet."

"Don't I know it. Forget I said anything."

It didn't take more than five minutes for the squire to sack right out, her head bobbing on Nick's shoulder, snoring quietly. This was probably for the best, because it also didn't take long before their feet were sinking in mud. The terrain got steeper the closer they got to the fleet lockup. Euthalia did her best to find dry places to step, but looks could be deceiving and it was still too early in the morning for much daylight and the light from her Pip-Boy didn't help much. Once again she stepped on what looked like a dry pile of leaves only for them to immediately give way and send her slipping back down. She bumped hard into Nick but he kept moving, his own force gently but firmly pushing her up the hill.

"Got room for one more?" she joked.

"Sorry, currently operating at full capacity. You want to ask her to trade?"

"I'm good. Seriously, Nick, thank you. It means a lot to me that you're willing to do this kind of thing with me. I know hanging around the Brotherhood isn't your favorite thing to do."

"Mine is not to reason why."

"Is that poetry? You know I'm not good with poetry."

"Close. 'Theirs not to reason why; theirs but to do and die.'"

"I don't know if I like that, Nick. I don't know if I like that at all."

 "Don't know what you want me to say. I like tagging along with you. And the kid's nice enough." He paused at the crest of the hill, waiting for her to climb up on her own. "There's the place."

They stood for a moment, taking in the rusted semi trailers, the ramshackle buildings, what appeared to be a dead guy on the roof. The road leading up to it was pitted with potholes deep enough to lose a yao guai in.

"Better get the kid," Nick said. He crouched down til the girl's feet touched the ground. Euthalia shook her shoulder a bit and she blinked herself awake.

"I wasn't sleeping," she said.

"I know, sweetie, just resting your eyes. Look, we're nearly there."

The squire rubbed at her eyes and blinked up at the fleet lockup. "Awesome."

"Yeah," Euthalia said, exchanging a look with Nick. "Damn... uh, darn awesome."

Without another word the squire began stumbling up the last hill.

"It'll be fine." Euthalia looked from the squire back to Nick. "It's probably gonna be fine."

He nodded, and she knew it was totally going to be fine. He wouldn't let anything happen to either of them.

The squire was more awake now, as the sun crept up over the horizon. She ran a little ahead of them, pointing out local flora. "That's a hubflower. You don't want to eat them. They're really really bad for you." She stopped for a moment and frowned.

"Well, they're bad for you," she said to Euthalia, and waved a hand at Nick. "I don't know if it's bad for it. We could give him one and find out. That's what Proctor Quinlan would do."

She glanced quickly at Nick. His expression was still blank, didn't look all that hurt, but this was what those parenting books she got at the hospital called a teaching moment.

"Look, sweetie," she said, crouching down to be closer to eye level. Now she was too short. There had to be a better way. "I know what the Brotherhood says about synths."

"That they're monstrosities whose very existence blasphemes the concept of free will and must be eradicated if we are to ever live in peace without a second apocalypse destroying us all?"

"Yikes," said Nick.

"Um, right, that. That's what they say. But just because they say something doesn't mean it's necessarily true. What if they told you the sky was green?"

"The sky is colorless. It only appears blue because the gas molecules that make up the sky absorb different wavelengths and radiate blue light."

Nick whistled softly.

"Right. So the sky is blue."

"That's a common oversimplification."

Maybe it was a blessing she'd never have to help Shaun with science homework, Euthalia reflected a little sadly. "That's not really my point. But if the Brotherhood told you the sky was green, maybe because they saw a radiation storm or something, well, they'd mean the sky looked green to them. But they would still be wrong, because they've only seen part of the sky and think their experience is the same as everyone else's."

The squire looked doubtful but said nothing.

"It's like that with synths. They've seen some of the really bad stuff the Institute has done, some of the mean things they do with synths, and decided that means all synths are bad. But they aren't. They're kind of like people that way. There are bad synths, but there are good ones too, and we can't let ourselves get so hung up on the bad synths that we let ourselves be cruel to good synths. Like Nick!" She hooked her arm around Nick and squeezed him. It was awkward for them both. "Nick is a good synth and it isn't fair to judge him by what the other synths have done. Also he's a him, not an it." None of this sounded as eloquent as it had in her head. "Does... does that make sense?"

The squire looked at her and then to Nick and then back. "Yes, ma'am," she said at last.

"Good. Glad to hear that! Now please apologize to Nick for threatening to poison him for science."

The squire bowed her head. "I'm sorry, sir. It won't happen again."

"Yeah," Nick said, for apparent lack of anything else to say.

"Very good. Thank you. Now, is it ghouls... uh, feral ghouls we're supposed to be purging here? That's usually who I've found here. Not usually a lot of them, come to think of it, but..."

"Hold it." Nick held up a hand for science. "Something's coming."

"Is it ghouls?" The squire looked a little too excited for Euthalia's taste.

"Unless there's some new kind of ghoul that buzzes instead of groans, that's a no." Nick turned and looked back down the road. "And if the ferals are flying now..."

Euthalia followed his gaze. At the foot of the hill, picking up speed and bumping into each other, a trio of bloatflies bumbled their way closer. "Kiddo, I think you'd better take cover."

"Yes, ma'am! You can do it, ma'am!" The squire hustled behind the rocky outcropping the fleet lockup was built into.

Nick took a couple of potshots with his pipe revolver and the bloatflies kept coming.

"It's fine," he said.

"Yup." Euthalia gave a little thought to her own pistol or maybe the laser rifle, but the drunken way the bloatflies kept bouncing about made melee seem like a better choice. If she could aim, after all, she wouldn't have invested so much training into using Pickman's blade. "Let's do it."

And before all her doubts could butt in, she took off at a sprint and started stabbing.

"See, this is a learning opportunity," she called back to the squire. "The Brotherhood probably trains you mostly for engaging your enemies at a distance, but it never hurts to be prepared for close quarters combat." She sunk the knife into a bloatfly's back and slung the bug slingshot-style into the nearest ditch. "See?"

"Yes, ma'am!"

"I got your back," Nick called to her, and she turned just in time to see a second bloatfly buzz dangerously close to her head. The gunfire cracked and it too went down.

"Thanks!" she started to call back, but now she could see the third bloatfly, weaving its way up toward the squire, who in turn, rather than take cover, was holding up her hands to show the bug she was a non-combatant. "Frick!" She started scrambling up the rocks after them.

"Got her too," Nick said. Suddenly he was there, stepping in front of the squire, and the bloatfly did that thing, that horrible disgusting thing, where it shot the little bloatfly larva and it stuck right in Nick's shoulder and sprayed him with, with, with whatever the hell that fluid was that bloatflies tried to blind you with.

Nick grabbed the larva stinger with his right hand and ripped it out. Whatever that fluid was it had him drenched from head to toe. He looked down at himself with a disgusted expression.

"Ah, shit," he said.

"Language, Nicholas," Euthalia shouted, and leapt up the last few feet and stabbed the hell out of that bloatfly. It exploded into a shower of giblets and coated them both in bits of bug.

"Gross," said the squire, stepping out from behind Nick completely unharmed. "The other squires are gonna be so jealous when I get back."

 There was bloatfly gunk all over her and not a single dry spot on her clothes to wipe them off with. Nick found a less-gunky spot on his sleeve and offered it to her.

"Now what do you say," she asked the squire, "to the person who protected you from corrosive bug guts or... whatever this is?"

The squire saluted her. "Thank you, ma'am!" And, after a stern looking-at: "Thank you too, sir!"

"Yup," Nick said, and nothing else.

 "There, that wasn't so bad. Anybody hurt? Anybody? No? Perfect!" Euthalia popped her glasses back on. Everything was still slightly blurry, but it beat tripping over potholes and breaking her neck. "That's good. Because I'm fairly sure the Brotherhood didn't send us out all this way to swat some flies. Um... is there anything specific I'm supposed to be teaching you? Kells didn't really give me specifics."

"I'm supposed to observe you clearing a location," the squire said, and her tone of voice led Euthalia to believe she probably had only a loose understand of what specifically she was supposed to be picking up. Anything and everything, probably.

"Okay. Okay, well, I guess you're gonna get a unique experience. Nick and I, um, we can teach you all about subtlety."

"Yeah," Nick grumbled, slapping at the stains on his coat. "We just ooze subtlety."

"See, my experience with the Brotherhood has been that they charge right in and deal with their problems. Or fly in, or... which is fine! They have every right to do that if that's what they want. But Nick and I, we don't use power armor so much, and we don't have much in the way of firepower." She glanced meaningfully at Nick's little peashooter but he pretended not to notice. She had convinced him to use a missile launcher once... only once. "So if we want to get ahead we have to use our powers of subterfuge."

The squire squinted at her suspiciously. "That's what the Institute does. They use their powers of subterfuge."

What kind of vocabulary were they teaching those kids? "Right. They do. But this is different. We're not infiltrating people's families or teleporting in and out of the Commonwealth." She looked to Nick for some back-up. He shrugged at her. Some help. "See, if you're like us, lightly armored, it helps to be light on your feet. You just sort of crouch down like this..." Here she did go ahead and crouch down and Nick followed along. "Then it's harder for people to see you coming. And if you're like me and you like, well, the old stabby-stabby, you can do way more damage if they don't see you coming. Like so."

She crouch-walked her way up through the gates of the fleet lockup. She surveyed the scene--one hostile, a feral ghoul having a nap under a semi trailer--and waved for the other two to follow. Nick obligingly crept up beside her. The squire came running up in her big clod-hopping boots and the ghoul immediately stirred and began crawling toward her. Again the squire put up her hands, because obviously a feral ghoul would be able to recognize the international sign for "I surrender," and Euthalia panicked and stabbed the ghoul so hard its leg fell off.

"That was amazing, ma'am!" The squire put her arms back down.

"Thanks. We'll... we'll keep working on the stealth thing." Nick gave her a bemused smile and she smacked him. "Come on, we'll get this place cleared out in no time."

 


	3. Chapter 3

What was supposed to be a short mission took them three hours.

It wasn't a difficult mission. The place wasn't locked up especially tight. There were very conveniently located crates, so they could hop up and investigate the dead guy on the roof (he'd been up there a while. also had a bag of cash, which would have been more exciting if people still used that money). There were only two feral ghouls.

That was the problem.

They walked all over that damn lot and in the end only turned up the last ghoul by complete accident. Euthalia was climbing up the stairs to the loft when she happened to glance down and there was the last ghoul, snoozing in the crevice between two crates.

"Who even sleeps like that?" she asked as they hiked off to Sanctuary. Rhetorical question, of course; everybody the squire knew probably slept in military bunk beds, Nick didn't sleep at all, and Euthalia had once slept on a mattress with the skeleton of a traveling salesman who'd been dead for two hundred years.

 "I don't know," Nick said, "but I am picking up a signal from Sanctuary. Distress call?"

"Let me check." She flipped through the stations on her Pip-Boy to Radio Freedom and was immediately assailed by news of a synth infiltrator at Sanctuary Hills. "Sounds like a synth attack. We'd better get moving."

They both looked down at the squire and she looked up at them. They looked at each other.

"Might be faster that way," he said.

"If you're okay with it."

The squire was already giggling. Nick crouched down and she jumped right up on his back.

"Alright," he said, getting back up. "Let's go."

 They headed north, and when she glanced over at Nick with the squire on his back, her arms wrapped around his shoulders, and again it was so cute she could have died right there. She didn't, of course, she'd save that part of the lesson for the synth attack, but somehow just looking at the two of them getting along made her think everything could be okay after all.

Instead of circling around to take the bridge into Sanctuary they headed across the stream, dodging bloodbugs the whole way, and caught up with a group of Gen 2 synths laying waste to the wind turbines on the foundation of a demolished house. Euthalia tried to indicate to the squire that she should take cover, but the squire immediately picked up a fallen branch and set her face in a hardened Brotherhood combat expression.

"What is that going to do?" Euthalia hissed to her as Nick took cover behind a shrub and checked that his revolver was loaded.

"If you gave me a laser rifle I could help," the squire returned, and one of the synths swiveled 180 degrees and let off a series of blasts that came so close she could feel the heat.

Euthalia shoved the squire down behind the foundation. "We'll talk about it later. Stay down and keep quiet."

While Nick drew their attention she crab-walked around to flank the synths. Off in the distance she could hear gunfire--more synths, probably approaching from the east. Hopefully between the settlers and the turrets Sanctuary could hold them off long enough for her to get over there.

There were four synths within reach. She went for the one nearest the squire first and caught it--him?--by enough surprise to take him down in one hit. The second one took a couple of blows, one to the arm and one to the chest, before it went down, and the third blocked her attacks and grazed her shoulder with a stray shot. She tried to dodge behind him, lose him in the support beams of the turbines, but he rotated after her like a turret and she would have been a goner if Nick hadn't appeared behind them and hit the synth with the butt of his gun. The synth didn't go down but it staggered him enough for Euthalia to get her blade in the joint where his pistol arm met his shoulder and twisted so hard if the arm hadn't given the blade would have. The synth looked at her with not-quite surprise and she severed his head.

Now there was just one left, but in the scuffle the last synth had slipped off the back of the foundation, far enough that she couldn't immediately jump at him. The squire, she thought in a panic, where's the squire, but the synth swiveled and there she was, climbed up on his back like she'd done with Nick, only this time she was waling on his with her branch. She ran at them, grabbed the squire from behind, and Nick took the synth down with two quick headshots.

"I thought I told you to stay down," she demanded, but the squire tried to wriggle free and peered off toward the east.

"There's more people over there," she said. "We've got to help them!"

And maybe now was not the time or place but Euthalia felt damn proud. That wasn't something the Brotherhood taught, the need to help other people. That was something she'd done all on her own.

Well, her and Nick.

They ran side by side through the cul-de-sac and finally spotted the settlers, clumped up behind the shack. Half the turrets were silent and Euthalia had to wonder how many damn synths there were to be taking down so many turrets and still coming strong. Then she saw the generator, black smoke curling up from its silent hull. Someone had sabotaged the power. There must have been an infiltrator after all.

First priority was the settlers. There was a group of them pinned down beyond the hedges, looked like Sturges was leading them, but they weren't firing back on the synths and that was who needed her help the most. She left Nick to fend off the main horde with the help of the settlers who were still fighting and sprinted her way between the synths  and Sturges' group. Something hit her hard, not enough to knock her down but she could smell something burning--one of the synths had gotten a shot off on her full in the chest plate but hey, at least she had some type of armor, god knew the settlers didn't, and she rammed the first synth she saw with her shoulder.

"Just in the nick of..." she heard Sturges say, but there were more incoming and she flailed out with a leg to try and upset their balance but they righted themselves easily. She got the knife into one's back and twisted until something popped but something hit her again, hard, in the back of the head and she lost her grip on the knife. Where was it, she dropped to her knees and scrabbled around but she couldn't find it, couldn't figure out which synth it was in, there were too many and there was a rifle up against her head and no way in hell she was going to survive a headshot...

And there was Nick again, putting himself between her and the gun and it wasn't a headshot thank god but he took it full on in the guts and went down and she saw him drop his revolver and she snatched it up off the ground and fired it off, again and again and again and pop pop pop the synths were falling around her now. There was no more gunfire now, that had to be it, that was the entirety of them right there and it was over and she felt sick to her stomach as she turned back to Nick.

 He was still upright, mostly, his legs sprawled at weird angles and an arm hooked across his middle. He gave her a shaky grin and said, "Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing..."

"Knock it off," she told him. Her entire body felt like jelly she was so relieved. She dug out a stimpack and jabbed it into his shoulder, and as she did it the Pip-Boy alerted again, danger, and as one last synth bore down on them from the woods she held onto Nick's arm and thought maybe they were going to die after all, and then the squire popped up beside them and swung out with that stupid branch and must have caught the synth off-guard because it stumbled back and then a hail of fire from the turrets brought it down.

She looked at Nick and held his arm and he looked back at her and held the stimpack in place in his shoulder, and without meaning to she burst out laughing and let her head fall forward against his chest and she thought she'd die laughing. Nick sat there for a moment, and then he was chuckling too and she thought this was definitely not what she'd had in mind when she offered to mentor an adolescent child.

The squire stood there, still brandishing her stick, and looked like she'd never had more fun in her entire life. As the settlers started to move around--it didn't look like anybody was mortally injured, not yet anyway--she threw down her stick and it bounced off the synth's body and she grinned at Euthalia.

"I don't see why everyone isn't out to eradicate these abominations!" she said.

It was too late for her to stop laughing, but her heart sank and beside her Nick went quiet. She squeezed his arm--sorry--and looked at the squire, still up and kicking, maybe a little wiser, and still couldn't help but feel that she'd failed.


	4. Chapter 4

She went up to the Prydwen by herself and reported on the squire's progress. Told Kells--what else?--the squire had done very well. She'd observed as she was supposed to and obviously knew all the basic tenets of the Brotherhood. Picked up her pay. And when she couldn't justify avoiding him any more, she took the vertibird back to the airport and met up with Nick on the beach.

She found him sitting in the sand, looking out at the sunset reflecting in the water and fiddling absently with the tension on his right hand.

"Didn't pick up another one?" he asked when she flopped down beside him.

Euthalia laughed a little at that. "God no. I need a break from this whole mentor thing."

He didn't question that. Instead he shook the sand out of his steel bones and worked that one index finger that was always sticking.

"Are you..." She had to work herself up to this. "Are you okay?"

"Me? Never better. I've had a hell of a lot worse than one body-shot."

"That wasn't really what I meant." She pushed the sand up over her feet so she could look at something else besides him. "But I'm glad to hear that too. I think."

"Alright. So what did you mean?"

She winced. Talking about things--feelings especially--was not her favorite pastime. "I meant the squire. What she said, there at the end. I thought she was learning. But obviously she wasn't."

"You mean where she called synths abominations? Yeah. I've been called a hell of a lot worse than that too."

"But I was trying to teach her. I thought maybe I could make a difference in how they do things." Even as she said it it occurred to her how stupid this all was. Who was she to think that she could change the way the Brotherhood dealt with their problems, just by talking to one kid?

"That does bring up a question I had." He slipped his screwdriver back into his pocket but kept flexing the skeletal hand. "What are you trying to accomplish with the Brotherhood, anyway? Sure doesn't seem like you agree with the way they do business."

"No." She had to admit that, even to him. "But it's not like they're... evil. They have some good points. It is a good idea to learn as much as you can, and the way they stick together is... good. I just feel like they shouldn't have to be at odds with the minutemen or with... with the Railroad." God, what an idiot she was. Did she even hear herself? The Brotherhood getting along with the Railroad? The world wasn't the idealistic place she'd hoped it would be when she was younger. The world wasn't even like that two hundred years ago. She stuck her hands deep in the sand and hunched over herself. "I know that's a stupid idea."

Nick didn't say anything for a moment. Finally she felt him move a little closer, saw, out of the corner of her eye, him bury his synthetic hand in the sand as well.

"It's not stupid," he said at last. "Impractical, maybe. But it says a lot about you that you can see that in your head."

Great, she was delusional as well as stupid.

"In my line of work," he continued, "you see a lot of people at their worst. It's hard not to let that get to you. I wish everybody could see the good in people the way you do."

It was kind of hard to see. She was crying, she realized.

"But I gotta ask, kid." He was silent for another moment. "What are you going to do if you can't save everyone?"

She opened her mouth, not entirely sure what she was going to say, but instead of words a sob came out. She pulled her hands out of the sand and covered up her head and cried and cried.

"I'm sorry," Nick said. She felt him awkwardly put an arm around her. "I know that's not a fair question."

It was all too much to deal with right now. Shaun was gone, Nate was dead, everything she'd ever known was meaningless now, and she couldn't change any of it. She wrapped her arms around Nick and buried her head in his shoulder and wished... and wished... for what? For things to go back to the way they were?

"I know," Nick said. "I know."

She didn't know what it was she wished. But she was grateful that at least there was him.


End file.
